Visitation

Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Visitation, can be read as a response
or a companion to Sebald’s The Emigrants. The German title makes
this clearer: Heimsuchung, ‘looking for home’, ‘returning home’.
Like Sebald, Erpenbeck attempts to take the long view of modern German
history, though her perspective is geological rather than historical.
Visitation begins with an account of the landscape around a lake in
Brandenburg: ‘Approximately 24,000 years ago, a glacier advanced until
it reached a large outcropping of rock …’ Twenty-four thousand years
later, a wealthy mayor owns most of the lakeside real estate. He
produces no sons; one of his four daughters goes mad and drowns in the
lake; the others fail to marry. The land goes out of the family. An
architect buys it some time after the First World War (there are few
dates given) and builds a beautiful house on it, with stained glass
windows, wrought-iron balconies, a secret closet. This house
subsequently passes through a string of owners and occupants: a Jewish
family waiting for their visas; the Russian army; another architect,
an East German who is later imprisoned for doing business with the
West – until it falls into disrepair. At the end of the book, the
house is torn down and the landscape, ‘if ever so briefly, resembles
itself once more’. The landscape, of course, doesn’t care who occupies
it, and if the view you take is long enough then the terrible events
of the 20th century that shaped these people’s lives begin to look
rather small.